From Toy to Tool: Extending Tag Clouds for Software and Information Visualisation

Software visualisation employs techniques from the more general information visualisation field to help software engineers comprehend and manage the size and complexity of software systems. The scale and complexity of the software engineering domain pose significant challenges and it is important to make effective use of techniques which can be adapted effectively to support tasks in this context. In this paper, we extend significantly the tag cloud concept, transforming it from a simple toy into a powerful tool which can help address challenges inherent in software visualisation. We illustrate our approach with examples drawn from our software engineering research programme and describe Taggle, a tool which implements our techniques. Our visualisations support developers as they search, filter, browse, explore and act upon data and are a useful addition to the software visualisation tool kit.

I. Introduction

Despite many advances in theory, tools and practices, scaling software development to cope effectively with systems of ever-increasing current sizes and complexities has continued to be very demanding - as is indicated by the number of IT projects which fail or are significantly compromised. The problem is multi-faceted: more than just technical aspects are involved. Developers need to communicate with their future and former selves: diagrams and visualisations provide convenient time capsules for this purpose.